Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various...
First works with pure color. The slits are organized into vertical Yellow-Red-Blue strips which move laterally across the screen according to a pre-calculated order.
9 key moving image works created by filmmaker Christian Lebrat over a ten-year period (1976-1985). Each film focus on an aspect of his experimentation with the use of color in cinema.
Covers the making of the multicolored magazine for technological arts, Melba, edited by Claudine Eizykman and in which Guy Fihman, Dominique Willoughby, among others, were active participants, with 5 issues published between 1976 and 1979.
"In Trama, Lebrat divides a surface vertically to be filmed in six equal segments of color (yellow, red, blue, green, violet, orange). The composition stays exactly the same all the way through the film. The filmmaker puts a band on the side of every two or three frames. Constructed step-by-step,...
To come back to abstraction, I have a feeling that colour varies in my work between two aspects: the colour-object that comes from the sensation of an object, in this case the film strip, and the opening. This colour-object permits the transporting of objects into space, to explore the space of the...
The densest film of the divided-frame group is the aptly titled 1978 Networks, which includes as many as 20 exposures of the same roll of film. Here only one slit was used, but Lebrat combines within one image many narrow strips taken at diverse Paris locations, sometimes seen through colored...
Filmed at night, with no manipulation. The hypnotic effect of the image, composed of abstracts motifs, in dialogue with the enigmatic sound track, ponctuated by micro-sound events.
"Christian Lebrat said he thought of Monet, who painted with the series Water Lilies colors ‘at the edge of the visible;’ those of Holon indeed display colors so intense, so enraged with energy that they release in a pure way the performative, exclamative character, the character of act which,...
First works with pure color. The slits are organized into vertical Yellow-Red-Blue strips which move laterally across the screen according to a pre-calculated order.
For the films in which Lebrat divided the screen he placed a piece of paper with one or more slits in it in front of the lens, allowing only a narrow strip of imagery to register. He then exposed the film multiple times, layering images. The initial effect is confusion—it’s often hard to...
"In the 1990 text on his film Autoportrait au dispositif (1981), Lebrat wrote that all his films are in fact self-portraits, including those that are abstract colour films, and the Rothko's painting are the most beautiful examples of self-portraiture in twentieth century art. lebrat notes that the...
Very little was left of the film by Anne Prat, a brilliant student who studied cinema with me at the University of Paris in the 1970s. Anne Prat was not just any student. Three weeks before summer break in 1976, even though she had not taken part in any of practical lessons, she presented a short...
In Organisation II, the vertical colored strips (red, yellow, and blue) whose height matches that of the screen move laterally while flickering on and off.
"A city, its crowds; crowds processed on film then transferred to video. I used a technique particular to video to manipulate a vertical section of the image sideways, changing both its shape and color density. Each operation was repeated a number of times, in a series of consecutive incrustations....
Filmed unexpectedly on the port of Genoa, the jazz music resonates with the lights of the city. The video loop, multiplied and worked on during the editing, induces in the spectator a kind of spatio-temporal hypnosis reinforced by the light patterns that change status and the "depth" of the sound...
